quotes tagged with 'rational'

The foundation of that isn't some ideal of romantic love. It's a commitment based on the goals you share. And real love, married love, is not what you start with -- it's what you create together along the way.

How foolish, when our young people wait to find love, or to have God show them their foreordained mate, instead of rationally looking at the eligible people and choosing someone who can and will live up to the commitment of marriage, someone with shared faith, someone with whom you can establish friendship and affection.

All marriages are between strangers. And sometimes it's the boring man who'll make the best husband, the plain woman who'll make the best mother.

It takes time to come to know the other person; it take time for each of you to become someone new and different and perfectly adapted to the other. You'll be there through the whole process, though, because your commitment is stronger than the bands of death.

But as that knowledge grows, so does the real love, the deep love. Compared to the thick, strong fabric of married love, romantic love is a Kleenex. You can't make anything out of it. It's disposable -- there's always another in the box.

We are often happiest when we are WORKING, despite the demands of contemporary work. It is when we most commonly experience "flow," that sense of doing what we do well, when we can lose ourselves in the moment. Many of us work at home at least part of the time now, and we can make the experience more rewarding. We can enjoy it, whether we are working for ourselves or others, because there are ways to optimize flow. And that means creating an environment that functions well and feels good. Drop the office aesthetic; it subliminally reinforces the message that work is a duty. And, given that so much of what we do is technological in texture, it is important to bring some warmth, some life, some sensuous pleasure. Have your office in the toolshed or in bed sometimes. Make it pleasurable. Establish personal rituals. Allegedly Edith Sitwell sat in a coffin before she started work, whereas Katherine Mansfield gardened, and Colette picked the fleas off her cat. Anything to stave off the moment. In practice, work boils down to right-brain creative work and left-brain logical work. You can't speed up right-brain work. It is highly intuitive and hard to schedule. We do it best when we let ideas happen in their own time. Left-brain work depends on efficiency, processes, and very good tools. It is fast, rational, analytical, linear. Each type needs its own environment.

Shafir and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, demonstrates that paralysis can also be caused by choice.

...Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This isn't "rational," but it is human.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that's why finding the core is so valuable. The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty. They will suffer from the need to choose--even when the choice is between two good options, like the lecture and the foreign film.

Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what's important.

Why would Satan care about such things as our view of metaphysics and epistemology? Because if he can shape our views on those issues, then those views provide a basis, as Alma declares, to “destroy the children of God.” (Alma 30:42.) The philosophy Satan taught Korihor is a rational system. It is not true, but it is rational! If we accept the assumption that there is no super-natural reality, then it logically follows that there is no God. If that is the case, then man is the supreme being. It also follows that if there are no eternal realities, then there are no eternal consequences for man’s actions. Korihor’s reasoning is that man himself determines what is right and wrong, not some set of rules laid down by a group of phony religious leaders claiming to speak for a God who doesn’t exist.